Four hours of Beatrix Potter, 10 hours of Marcel Proust, or 72 hours of Sherlock Holmes. How about every single word of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Eliot’s Silas Marner? Sound overwhelming? Radio bosses clearly think not – so much so they have commissioned a plethora of literary adaptations to delight growing numbers of fans of “the long listen”.
“There is an appetite for the epic that has simply surpassed our expectations,” says Celia De Wolff, who has produced and directed a marathon adaptation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, to be broadcast over three days this bank holiday weekend on Radio 4. A seven-volume epic published between 1913 and 1927 may not seem an obvious choice for contemporary audiences short on time but rich in entertainment options, but a fast-growing audience is transforming the industry.
“Who has the time to sit down and read Proust cover to cover?” says De Wolff. “Event radio like this gives the audience a sense of achievement. People want to feel they have experienced something comprehensive and worthwhile over [their weekend].”
Radio 4 listeners will be able to tune in later this year to a series of 20 unabridged classics, from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to The War of the Worlds by HG Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. The works, which will be available to stream on the BBC Sounds app at the end of the month, also include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Belief in the growing popularity of long listens is shared by rival Audible, the Amazon-owned platform that hosts audiobooks, original podcasts and specially commissioned dramas for millions of members worldwide. Laurence Howell, director of content at Audible UK, points to explosive year-on-year growth. “More and more of our members are sitting down at home to listen especially to Audible content and, on average, listen to two hours’ worth a day,” he says. Last year’s biggest seller for Audible was Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection – 72 hours of Arthur Conan Doyle stories narrated by Stephen Fry. “Digital technology and ability to listen on your phone anywhere have driven a real boom,” adds Howell. “Audiences now are demanding even longer ways to consume classics, contemporary fiction and non-fiction. And audio consistently outperforms other formats – sales for physical and ebooks, for instance, are flat or declining but audio is growing dramatically.”
The signs have been there for some time. In 2015 De Wolff’s 10-hour production of War and Peace, broadcast on Radio 4 over most of New Year’s Day, was dubbed a “brilliantly high-brow binge” by the Guardian.
“There was a phenomenal response,” says De Wolff. “War and Peace ended up trending on Twitter that day.”
In an environment cluttered with visual stimulation and distraction, she is hopeful that “the use of imagination, where you have to paint pictures in your mind and fill in the gaps, is coming back.”
Dr Javid Sadr, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, has studied the effects of “slow” media – be it TV, visual art or literature – on the brain and believes there are considerable benefits to epic audio binges: “It takes top-down control to direct and hold your attention on this one thing. Mastering and controlling your environment when it’s so filled with stimulation makes the rest of the world quieter, less bright and less noisy. The neural response to this, where you’re immersed and focused, ultimately feels good.”
That our brains “are trained to be distracted and overstimulated” plays another part. Sadr cites a “bucket-list culture”, which sees audiences seeking ever more extreme experiences to be able to really feel engaged. “Think about how television has changed: people watch entire seasons in one night rather than one episode.”
Then there’s the change in language, he says: “Everyone talks hyperbolically about being ‘obsessed’ with something now: podcasts or Game of Thrones or what have you, and it feeds that same impulse.”
For the makers of long listens it’s a boom time. “There are more than 400,000 titles available on Audible in the UK,” says Howell. “Our customers downloaded nearly 3 billion hours of content in 2018.”
The platform now commissions works especially for Audible, and has a roster that includes Michael Lewis, Jon Ronson, Philip Pullman and Sarah Hall. Epic collections including the works of Dickens (40 hours) and HG Wells (27 hours) continue to perform as bestsellers.
“The thought of reading endless pages of a novel is scary for audiences but they still have a huge curiosity,” says De Wolff. “Listeners who follow a book from beginning to end, whether they’re in the car or washing up, will experience the sense of a big read.”
It might be considered brave commissioning, but for anyone in search of lost time in which to read the 4,000-plus pages of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, the radio epic offers an immersive primer.
Podcasts have done a lot to popularise a new way of listening, says Sadr. “Other professors will tell me that they have read a book when they have actually listened to it, and my students will often tell me about something they learned on a podcast rather than read. There is more richness to a voice than there is to plain text, and the more work audiences put in to focus [on a long listen], the more they feel nourished and positive about the experience.”